New and Collected Poems: 1931-2001 (2025)

‘The gates of grammar closed behind him.
Search for him now in the groves and wild forests of the dictionary.’
Czesław Miłosz (30 June 1911 – 14 August 2004)

1980 ‘s Nobel Laureate, and my personal favorite poet, Czesław Miłosz left behind a beautiful collection of poetry and political thought that chronicles both the human suffering during the 20th century as well as his own personal experiences, triumphs and tribulations as he went from war-town Poland to the United States. Often recognized more for his political musings, such as those in the excellent book The Captive Mind, Miłosz always stressed that he was first a foremost a poet. His poetry, however, does contain some of his greatest political statements and insights as Miłosz used his poetry as a method to speak against the totalitarian mindset and stand up for human rights. Provocative, moving, and glimmering with gorgeous prose, Miłosz’s works taken as a whole form a breathtaking portrait of an extraordinary man.

‘ The history of my stupidity would fill many volumes.’

Much of Miłosz early work is centered around the Polish political climate, and understandably so as political unrest and war was a constant part of his early life. Even his birth was directly affected by the political climate, his parents fleeing to Lithuania for several years to escape the political turmoil, not returning until the new Polish state was established after WWI. His early catholic upbringing and his political activism while studying at the University, becoming involved with a radical group of contemporary poets, were the early seeds that would continue to grow and blossom throughout his body of work. Many of the horrors witnessed during WWII, and their effects on his contemporaries, is documented in The Captive Mind, illustrating his distaste for the totalitarian mindset and the lethal temptations of a totalitarian mentality on the activist intellectual. His memories of the war burn brightly in much of his early poetry.

Flight
When we were fleeing the burning city
And looked back from the first fiel path,
I said “Let the grass grow over our footprints,
Let the harsh prophets fall silent in the fire,
Let the dead explain to the dead what happened.
We are fated to beget a new and violent tribe
Free from the evil and the happiness that drowsed there
Let us go” – and the earth was opened for us by a sword of flames.

You Who Wronged
You who wronged a simple man
Bursting into laughter at the crime,
And kept a pack of fools around you
To mix good and evil, to blur the line,

Though everyone bowed down before you,
Saying virtue and wisdom lit your way,
Striking gold medals in your honor,
Glad to have survived another day,

Do not feel safe. The poet remembers.
You can kill one, but another is born.
The words are written down, the deed, the date.

And you’d have done better with a winter dawn,
A rope, and a branch bowed beneath your weight.

In 1951, having been sent to Paris to serve as a cultural attache by the Communist government, Miłosz defected and remained in France under political asylum until moving to the United States in 1960 to teach at the University of California, Berkeley (his poem A Magic Mountain comments on his time spent living in Berkeley). Miłosz’s feelings of alienation living in a foreign land and communicating in a foreign language permeate much of his poetry. His homeland was lost to him behind the Iron Curtain, and he was lost to them as all of his works were banned after his defection (the ban would be released after his 1980 Nobel Prize, Poland having no qualms then claiming him as a national hero with international success).

'One after another my former lives were departing,
like ships, together with their sorrow.'

Much of my favorite Miłosz is written in the last quarter of his life and contains his reflection on his life as a whole, his thoughts on aging and the poetic grappling with impending, inevitable death.

At A Certain Age
We wanted to confess our sins but there were no takers.
White clouds refused to accept them, and the wind
was too busy visiting sea after sea.
We did not succeed in interesting the animals.
Dogs, disappointed, expected an order,
A cat, as always immoral, was falling asleep.
A person seemingly very close
Did not care to hear of things long past.
Conversations with friends over vodka or coffee
Ought not to be prolonged beyond the first sign of boredom.
It would be humiliating to pay by the hour
A man with a diploma, just for listening.
Churches. Perhaps churches. But to confess there what?
That we used to see ourselves as handsome and noble
Yet later in our place an ugly toad
Half-opens its thick eyelid
And one sees clearly: “That’s me.”

Liberated from the phantoms of psychosis,
from the screams of perishing tissue,
from the agony of the impaled one,

It wanders through the world,
Forever, clear.

Miłosz is my amongst my favorites, so I’ve included a few other of my favorite poems below:

An Alcoholic Enters the Gates of Heaven
What kind of man I was to be you’ve known since the beginning,
since the beginning of every creature.

It must be horrible to be aware, simultaneously,
of what is, what was,
and what will be.

I began my life confident and happy,
certain that the Sun rose every day for me
and that flowers opened for me every morning.
I ran all day in an enchanted garden.

Not suspecting that you had picked me from the Book of Genes
for another experiment altogether.
As if there were not proof enough
that free will is useless against destiny.

Under your amused glance I suffered
like a caterpillar impaled on the spike of a blackthorn.
The terror of the world opened itself to me.

Could I have avoided escape into illusion?
Into a liquor which stopped the chattering of teeth
and melted the burning ball in my breast
and made me think I could live like others?

I realized I was wandering from hope to hope
and I asked you, All Knowing, why you torture me.
Is it a trial like Job’s, so that I call faith a phantom
and say: You are not, nor do your verdicts exist,
and the earth is ruled by accident?

Who can contemplate
simultaneous, a-billion-times-multiplied pain?

It seems to me that people who cannot believe in you
deserve our praise.

But perhaps because you were overwhelmed by pity,
you descended to the earth
to experience the condition of mortal creatures.

Bore the pain of crucifixion for a sin, but committed by whom?

I pray to you, for I do not know how not to pray.

Because my heart desires you,
though I do not believe you would cure me.

And so it must be, that those who suffer will continue to suffer,
praising your name.

Ars Poetica?
I have always aspired to a more spacious form
that would be free from the claims of poetry or prose
and would let us understand each other without exposing
the author or reader to sublime agonies.

In the very essence of poetry there is something indecent:
a thing is brought forth which we didn't know we had in us,
so we blink our eyes, as if a tiger had sprung out
and stood in the light, lashing his tail.

That's why poetry is rightly said to be dictated by a daimonion,
though its an exaggeration to maintain that he must be an angel.
It's hard to guess where that pride of poets comes from,
when so often they're put to shame by the disclosure of their frailty.

What reasonable man would like to be a city of demons,
who behave as if they were at home, speak in many tongues,
and who, not satisfied with stealing his lips or hand,
work at changing his destiny for their convenience?

It's true that what is morbid is highly valued today,
and so you may think that I am only joking
or that I've devised just one more means
of praising Art with thehelp of irony.

There was a time when only wise books were read
helping us to bear our pain and misery.
This, after all, is not quite the same
as leafing through a thousand works fresh from psychiatric clinics.

And yet the world is different from what it seems to be
and we are other than how we see ourselves in our ravings.
People therefore preserve silent integrity
thus earning the respect of their relatives and neighbors.

The purpose of poetry is to remind us
how difficult it is to remain just one person,
for our house is open, there are no keys in the doors,
and invisible guests come in and out at will.

What I'm saying here is not, I agree, poetry,
as poems should be written rarely and reluctantly,
under unbearable duress and only with the hope
that good spirits, not evil ones, choose us for their instrument.

Encounter
We were riding through frozen fields in a wagon at dawn.
A red wing rose in the darkness.

And suddenly a hare ran across the road.
One of us pointed to it with his hand.

That was long ago. Today neither of them is alive,
Not the hare, nor the man who made the gesture.

O my love, where are they, where are they going
The flash of a hand, streak of movement, rustle of pebbles.
I ask not out of sorrow, but in wonder.

Meaning
When I die, I will see the lining of the world.
The other side, beyond bird, mountain, sunset.
The true meaning, ready to be decoded.
What never added up will add Up,
What was incomprehensible will be comprehended.
- And if there is no lining to the world?
If a thrush on a branch is not a sign,
But just a thrush on the branch? If night and day
Make no sense following each other?
And on this earth there is nothing except this earth?
- Even if that is so, there will remain
A word wakened by lips that perish,
A tireless messenger who runs and runs
Through interstellar fields, through the revolving galaxies,
And calls out, protests, screams.

Christopher Robin (written upon hearing of the death of the real Christopher Robin. How touching is this one?)
I must think suddenly of matters too difficult for a bear of little brain. I have never asked myself what lies beyond the place where we live, I and Rabbit, Piglet and Eeyore, with our friend Christopher Robin. That is, we continued to live here, and nothing changed, and I just ate my little something. Only Christopher Robin left for a moment.
Owl says that immediately beyond our garden Time begins, and that it is an awfully deep well. If you fall in it, you go down and down, very quickly, and no one knows what happens to you next. I was a bit worried about Christopher Robin falling in, but he came back and then I asked him about the well. "Old bear," he answered. "I was in it and I was falling and I was changing as I fell. My legs became long, I was a big person, I grew old, hunched, and I walked with a cane, and then I died. It was probably just a dream, it was quite unreal. The only real thing was you, old bear, and our shared fun. Now I won't go anywhere, even if I'm called in for an afternoon snack."

I undertook this giant book, the collected works Czeslaw Milosz, as part of a course offered by poet Robert Hass through the Community of Writers. Hass did many of the translations and knew Milosz quite well in the many decades he lived and taught at UC Berkeley after his flight from Poland with the coming of the Nazis, his subsequent time in Paris and in the US. The poetry isn't easy in any way, because Milosz as a man was always at odds within himself, wrestling with himself over essential moral issues. Whenever he builds a structure of thought, he always comes in to undermine it. The opposite of Whitman in many ways, he wanted to be unitary, rather than embracing his multitudes.

The poems we concentrated on were:

1931-1945: Early poems-- “Song,” “Encounter,” “The World,” “Voices of Poor People,” “Dedication”

1946-60: The postwar years in Washington, Paris--Poems: “Song on Porcelain,” “Mid-Twentieth-Century Portrait”,” Mittelbergheim,” “A Treatise on Poetry”, especially the sections “The Spirit of History and “Natura,” “Esse”

1960-1969: first decade in California. Poems: “Throughout These Lands,” “Bobo”s Metamorphosis,” “City Without s Name,” and “With Trumpets and Zithers”

1970-1979: The second decade in California Poems: “From the Risings of the Sun”

1980-1990: The third decade (Nobel prize, death of his wife Janka) Poems: “A Magic Mountain,” “Study of Loneliness,” “The Separate Notebooks,” “Bypassing Rue Descartes,” all of “Unattainable Earth,” esp. “The Garden of Earthly Delights,” “After Paradise,” “The Hooks of the Corset,” “Annalena,” “Elegy for Y. Z.,” “Yanka,” “Theodicy,” ‘To Find My Home’

1990-2004 The last years, Berkeley, return to Europe, Krakow Poems: “Six Lectures in Verse,” “Undressing Justine,” “Wanda,” “In Szetejnie,” “An Alcoholic Enters the Gates of Heaven,” “Late Ripeness”

Whether they're long or short lines, there is a simplicity and directness to the language. Hass told the story of another poet translating a poem and added some images to enhance meter and rhyme, and Milosz hated that, wanted it straight and unvarnished. So the poems are for the. most part unrhymed.

he is dealing with the question of how to write after the Holocaust, and the amplification of the music must have seemed unseemly. He builds a beautiful image, and then he undercuts it. The multitude of voices within a long poem are an increasingly frequent feature of the poems. He writes about nature, but his feeling about nature's loveliness always undercut by its savagery. AS is mankind's sentimentality often undercut by our savagery. But he believed that civilization, art, literature--and religion--to be our saving impulse. And the man's humor comes through:

"If I had to tell what the world is for me
I would take a hamster or a hedgehog or a mole
and place him in a theater seat one evening
and, brining my ear close to his humid snout,
would listen to what he says about the spotlights,
sounds of the. music, and movement so the dance."
--"Throughout our Lands"

Just sublime.
Ranging from consciousness' murky pools,
To bucolic portraits in verdigris,
The soul striving for a frictionless heaven,
But mired within temporal wear and tear.
Probing oneself on paper o'er abraded years,
The philosopher of the northern forest,
Finding the earth an eternal mystery,
Bestowed in light by the Spirit of Love.
The sauce of wisdom simmering in time,
To spice home and hearth or coat grievous ruin.
The exile's gift wrapped in
Golden words.
Dziękuję.

Celebrating the Centennial of Czeslaw Milosz
(1911-2011)

This book is great compilation of all his known poetry in a single tome .

Last year the world celebrated the centennial of the great Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz. He was a poet whose extraordinary life spanned 93 years, five countries, two continents, most of the 20th century and the first years of the 21st. Born in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania-Poland, he spent his early childhood in Russia, then studied in Vilnius and Poland, before suffering the war in Warsaw and emigrating to Paris in 1951. In 1960 he immigrated to USA on a professorship at the Slavic department of Studies of University of California, Berkeley and worked there virtually in anonymity till he was bestowed the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1980. He lived more than 30 years in a modest house overlooking San Fransico Bay and in 1993 he returned to Krakow in Poland to live there till his death on August 14, 2004.

The magnitude of Czeslaw Milosz as an eminent poet and essayist is almost unimaginable. He was a hero of the history of his time and a hero of the literature of his time. Though a deep Catholic, Milosz's spiritual intensity never interfered with his historical clarity. His inner freedom seems never to have failed him. His life and his work justified, in all their complexities, the most elementary belief in the power of the truth. He had the face of a hawk and the heart of a dove. In a way he was as tough as time.

Adam Zagajewski, Poland's greatest living poet, mentioned during a recent memorial lecture (Available in YouTube) that Milosz was perhaps the only poet of 20th century who tried to grasp the totality of the world. If you had a chance to read his magnificent collected poetry, you will know that, like Whitman, Milosz was a universal poet who succeeded in grasping the totality of all human experiences. As Milosz speaks in a poem -"More clever than you, I learned my century, pretending I knew a method for forgetting pain."

Milosz was a poet who was in command of his medium. He knew what poetry should do and what poetry should refrain from. One of his greatest achievements is a poem titled- "A Treatise on Poetry", a sequence looking back on these events from the mid-50s. The short opening lyric calls for a clear direct style of image and thought, a poetry that can shoulder the responsibilities of its time - "One clear stanza can take more weight / Than a whole wagon of elaborate prose".

He was also a poet of strong moral consciousness. He became a leader among Polish-language modernists in the 1930s, then witnessed the Nazi destruction of Warsaw. His epochal early poetry described the horrors of war and the enduring power of joy: "I have seen the fall of States and the perdition of tribes”. Reflecting on the reaction of Polish Poetry to the experience of World War II , Milosz poses the basic question : “The act of writing a poem is an act of faith: yet if the screams of the tortured are audible in the poet’s room, is not his activity an offense to human suffering? From this stand point, every artistic creation becomes morally ambiguous. Thankfully Milosz himself has given best expression of this dilemma in his Nobel Prize speech which I quote below.

“Reality calls for a name, for words, but it is unbearable and if it is touched, if it draws very close, the poet's mouth cannot even utter a complaint of Job: all art proves to be nothing compared with action. Yet, to embrace reality in such a manner that it is preserved in all its old tangle of good and evil, of despair and hope, is possible only thanks to a distance, only by soaring above it - but this in turn seems then a moral treason”

Let us now examine some of the poems of Milosz that illustrates the craft of his poetry.

Milosz’s poems are based on observations and it gyrates like a moving camera, shifting constantly from what is near to what is distant. One can see a conscious clash between the desire to catch the fleeting moment and the feeling of absence of a constant reference point. The concreteness of Milosz’s imagination is evident in this poem, which has been one of my favorite Milosz poems.

Encounter

(Trans: Czeslaw Milosz & Lillian Vallee)

We were riding through frozen fields in a wagon at dawn.
A red wing rose in the darkness.

And suddenly a hare ran across the road.
One of us pointed to it with his hand.

That was long ago. Today neither of them is alive,
Not the hare, nor the man who made the gesture.

O my love, where are they, where are they going
The flash of a hand, streak of movement, rustle of pebbles.
I ask not out of sorrow, but in wonder.

In ‘Encounter’ Milosz is dealing with memory and events separated by a great gap in time – or perhaps more correctly, the one event looked at twice from different times. And this event is not so much one moment but one moment interrupted by a happening – the quiet monotonous motion of the wagon and the thoughts of those travelling on it jolted as a hare flashes across the road in front of them.

Just as the hare’s sudden presence interrupts the travellers’ awareness, the poem interrupts the awareness of the reader by its sudden shift in time: “That was long ago.”Milosz finds a kind of mystery, which cannot be understood, but hides behind such moments. It is as though the hare has become a symbol for the unexpected and ultimately life enforcing nature of existence. He makes use of simple and direct style and it is incredibly how far he takes the reader in such a short interval. The last stanza is like a lightning stroke and has the revelatory power of supreme utterance.

Milosz’s poetry has been called polyphonic and as he says-“I have always been full of voices speaking; in a way I consider myself an instrument, a medium”. Let us consider a famous poem titled “Dedication” . “Dedication” was written in Warsaw in 1945 – which is to say after more than six years of Nazi occupation, after the bloody suppression of the Warsaw uprising, the subsequent deportation of the city’s more than one million inhabitants, the destruction of all its remaining buildings, and its liberation by the Soviet army. Although Milosz never literally took up arms against the Nazis, he did endure narrow escapes at the start of the occupation, and his home, all of his books, and many of his early manuscripts were destroyed by German shelling.

Here the poet is addressing a dead young poet, a man who apparently died during the Nazi resistance. One can sense a bit of hubris or arrogance when the poet addresses the dead poet and says –“What strengthened me, for you was lethal”. He is speaking to someone frustratingly beyond the reach of his words, about whom he feels guilt for not saving: “I swear, there is in me no wizardry of words. / I speak to you with silence like a cloud or a tree”—a lie, of course, because this poem is written in words. They, in fact, are his millet seeds to propitiate the dead.

Dedication
transl: by Czeslaw Milosz

You whom I could not save
Listen to me.
Try to understand this simple speech as I would be ashamed of another.
I swear, there is in me no wizardry of words.
I speak to you with silence like a cloud or a tree.

What strengthened me, for you was lethal.
You mixed up farewell to an epoch with the beginning of a new one,
Inspiration of hatred with lyrical beauty,
Blind force with accomplished shape.

Here is the valley of shallow Polish rivers. And an immense bridge
Going into white fog. Here is a broken city,
And the wind throws the screams of gulls on your grave
When I am talking with you.

What is poetry which does not save
Nations or people?
A connivance with official lies,
A song of drunkards whose throats will be cut in a moment,
Readings for sophomore girls.
That I wanted good poetry without knowing it,
That I discovered, late, its salutary aim,
In this and only this I find salvation.

As I mentioned earlier, Milosz was born to a family of Polish-speaking landed gentry in Lithuania, a group that related to Poland rather as the Anglo-Irish gentry did to England. Over a lifetime, memories of the old manor grounds and surrounding woods provided him with his own vision of the land of youth. He attended university in Vilnius and as a young man moved to Warsaw, where he survived the war, working in the underground resistance, publishing anti-Nazi poems. In the bleakest hours of World War II, Milosz produced a masterpiece called ''The World,'' a sequence of 20 ''naive'' poems ''written in the style of school primers,'' in which the rudiments of a child's world -- the road, the gate, the porch, the dining room, the stairs, the poppies, the peonies -- are portrayed with the indomitability of genuine innocence. Against the horror, he pitted pastoral! And all the while he was working with the Polish underground. There were two ways, then, of resisting evil: engagement and disengagement; attachment and detachment; action against it and contemplation despite it. In his dark era, Milosz was the master of this complication, this salvation, of consciousness. The following poem titled “Love” is an excerpt from “The World”

Love
Transl: by Czeslaw Milosz

Love means to learn to look at yourself
The way one looks at distant things
For you are only one thing among many.
And whoever sees that way heals his heart,
Without knowing it, from various ills—
A bird and a tree say to him: Friend.

Then he wants to use himself and things
So that they stand in the glow of ripeness.
It doesn’t matter whether he knows what he serves:
Who serves best doesn’t always understand.

Milosz was well familiar with Indian philosophy and no wonder he reiterates that that to love, to be genuinely loving, we need to drop the attachment to the self as special; we need to see ourselves from a detached perspective, humbly acknowledging that we are only “one thing among many.” Milosz further claims that seeing oneself with detachment is a way to heal one’s heart of many grief .After all, our troubles are only part of that sea of troubles that life is for everyone.
It’s only after we have achieved this detachment, this humility, that we are capable of loving kindness and selfless service. Furthermore, it’s not necessary to know what it is we are serving. In fact, the person who understands is not the one who serves best, Milosz claims. When we aren’t self-absorbed, we feel united with others and with nature-“A bird and a tree say to him: Friend.”

The last poem I discuss here is his about his faith in books. I really love this poem as the physicality of books around me is a feeling that I adore. Many have become individualized over the years, filled with dog-ears and memories; old postcards and peacock feathers stuck in between chapters as bookmarks; an old photo preserved forever between the blank front pages; notes scribbled in margins. My life and the author's life have intersected here. In a world where whole libraries can be contained in a tiny 8" x 12" piece of plastic, this poem is an assertion of a book as a bodily book. Literature has survived changing forms before. But there is something so beautiful, so real, about books in a large, clunky form that I wonder what this new change will mean for the way that literature is read and understood

And Yet Books

(Transl: by Czeslaw Milosz)

And yet the books will be there on the shelves, separate beings,
That appeared once, still wet
As shining chestnuts under a tree in autumn,
And, touched, coddled, began to live
In spite of fires on the horizon, castles blown up,
Tribes on the march, planets in motion.
“We are, ” they said, even as their pages
Were being torn out, or a buzzing flame
Licked away their letters. So much more durable
Than we are, whose frail warmth
Cools down with memory, disperses, perishes.
I imagine the earth when I am no more:
Nothing happens, no loss, it’s still a strange pageant,
Women’s dresses, dewy lilacs, a song in the valley.
Yet the books will be there on the shelves, well born,
Derived from people, but also from radiance, heights.
Though at times his poetry may seem hermetic and philosophical, he has also written poems that reflects his enduring human love for the sensual and spiritual. Here is a sample.

A Confession

(Transl: by Czeslaw Milosz)

My Lord, I loved strawberry jam
And the dark sweetness of a woman’s body.
Also well-chilled vodka, herring in olive oil,
Scents, of cinnamon, of cloves.
So what kind of prophet am I? Why should the spirit
Have visited such a man? Many others
Were justly called, and trustworthy.
Who would have trusted me? For they saw
How I empty glasses, throw myself on food,
And glance greedily at the waitress’s neck.
Flawed and aware of it. Desiring greatness,
Able to recognise greatness wherever it is,
And yet not quite, only in part, clairvoyant,
I knew what was left for smaller men like me:
A feast of brief hopes, a rally of the proud,
A tournament of hunchbacks, literature.

In an interview Milosz says about his approach to crafting poems-“It is shedding skins, which means abandoning old forms and assumptions. I feel this is what makes writing exciting. My poetry is always a search for a more spacious form. I have always been in conflict with those theories of poetry that concentrate on the aesthetic object.”

Thousands lined the streets of Krakow to watch the funeral procession of poet when he died in 2004. His body was entombed at the historic Skałka Roman Catholic Church, one of the last to be commemorated there. Robert Hass, American poet and his translator, who attended the funeral found the whole church and streets heaped with white flowers of Lithuanian summer to mark the transition of the great poet.
There is a story that Czesław Miłosz, on a return visit to his birthplace in Lithuania some 50 years after he had left, walked up to an oak tree and embraced it. An image of the return of the native, of course, but also an image of someone drawing strength – the psychic, moral and physical strength of a great poet – from his home ground.

To conclude, as a modern poet, Milosz discharged his obligations to his age and his obligations to his soul with the same diligence and the same depth. He had the rare gift of knowing how to be at once troubled and unperturbed. The stability of his mind, its preternatural composure, was one of the great sanctuaries of the 20th century, a prophecy of the eventual emancipation. When light was needed, he was light; when stone was needed, he was stone. He was someone who lived by the haiku of Issa—“We walk on the roof of Hell / gazing at flowers”

Miłosz once wrote: "The child who dwells inside us trusts that there are wise men somewhere who know the truth." At this centenary moment, he himself has become one of those wise men.

Reference: New and Collected Poems : 1931-2001

Czeslaw Milosz, The Art of Poetry No. 70: The Paris Review

Czeslaw Milosz, 1911-2004: The New York Times -Sept 12, 2004

Seamus Heaney on Czesław Miłosz's centenary: Guardian 7th April 2011

In the thesis defense meeting for my Master of Fine Arts degree, one of my committee members—an illustrious guy—told me, “time to stop reading Rilke and start reading Milosz.” That was about two years ago now and I started this collection shortly thereafter. The resulting journey has been slow going. I had periods where I’d be reading fifty pages a week, and then others where I let the book rest untouched for a few months. At all points I considered its reading as a work-in-progress, until now, when I have finally read the last page of poetry, the last page of end notes.

What has happened in the interim? I think this is a question that applies both to the individual case of reading Milosz’s poetry, but also to the larger, more general act of reading the collected poems of an author. To start, I think it’s often unreasonable to imagine that we truly know a book after reading it once, but this is probably never more the case than after reading a collection of poems that is meant to cover the expanse of a career and life. Milosz, in particular, was too prolific for me to pretend that I now know his poems, not like, for example, how I know Rilke’s Duino Elegies after rereading them a few dozen times. On the other hand, it isn’t as if I don’t know the work—certainly after reading over seven hundred pages of poetry by a single writer, even after taking into consideration evolution of craft and stylistic variance, there is a manner in which I know the work. Yet, should you ask me to recall, offhand, a representative line, image, or figure? I wouldn’t, without reopening the book, be well-equiped to answer with any authority.

I believe what happens when you read the complete works of a poet, slowly, over time, is that you begin to accumulate a certain familiarity with the work/voice/substance of the poetry. I might not be able to quote many lines from memory, or delve too far into analyses about the presiding structures of the writing, not after one reading of his oeuvre, but I have a sense of how the poetry feels as it is being read. It’s not unlike the memory of the feeling of sitting in a particular chair, day after day, for hours, while studying. It’s sensory, rather than logical, and it is familiar, rather than formal. It’s the same sort of perception that distinguishes between the feeling of being in Edinburgh and the feeling of being in Seattle, without reference to visual cues, even at times when the climates feel remarkably similar. On the whole, I think this sort of familiarity accretes whenever the body of work of a poet is read steadily over time (perhaps all understandings of books, to a certain degree, work this way), but it is especially true in the case of Milosz, if by virtue of the sheer volume of poetry alone.

What did it feel like to read Milosz? At times it felt like sitting with a minor mystic, at other times it felt like listening to the elder of the tribe. I felt, nearly always, the urge towards visionary movement, contrasting with a strong desire for wisdom and rationality. At times where I felt resistant towards him, I thought of Milosz as the man-who-would-be-sage. At other times, I felt his voice to be breaking from the clouds. Moreover, there was nearly always impression that, “yes, this work is quotable,” and there were poems that were chock-full of pith. But simultaneously, there was a screen being held up, something of an attempt to shield the reader (and perhaps the author) from seeing the man behind the curtain. In a late poem, Milosz apologizes to Lowell for judging him harshly for his showy madnesses, and I got the sense that a barrier was always in place in the book so as to make real that distinction between the vibrance of the work and the demons of the man who wrote it. Even when seemingly personal details are disclosed in a self-deprecating fashion, there is a limit to how close one can get to the man himself.

I can imagine this limit being something of a manifestation of the trauma that Milosz spends most of his life trying to write. He wrote war, he wrote exile, he wrote spiritual doubt, he wrote heartache, and he wrote hamartia. I wonder if he ever suspected that all those attempts to write truth about suffering were, in the end, something of a circumnavigation that put into relief the real residue of trauma, the mostly impermeable wall between the man and the work. (I should probably clarify that I don’t think other authors are incarnate in their work, but rather that I think the specific quality of the barrier, in Milosz’s case, is what gives me this impression.) Or maybe it isn’t a barrier but a synapse, a chasm. There is probably a study to be done on moments of obvious absence, in terms of a subjective voice, but I’m not the one to do it. Whoever is, though, I might suggest they look at the Scottish poet, Sorley MacClean, for some uncanny resonances, at least concerning a poet who writes not only from the distance of being exiled from action, but exiled from the self as well.

I’ve gone a bit more in depth about my feelings than I intended, and still I haven’t gone all the way. I haven’t yet said that I felt deep ambivalence about Milosz’s late attempts at philosophy (in verse). I haven’t said that I never sat easily through his representations of women and relationships with them. I haven’t said there were times when I was ready to shake Milosz out of some bucolic fantasy, to say, “We have exalted the tree bark and the bee work and the brook babble enough already to know that you will deliver us to a maxim of some kind soon enough. Take me back to the war. And stop gesturing towards the bottle long enough to talk about how you drank!” But all that would also hide the fact that at times I had the impression of sitting cross-legged at his feet, nodding “yes, yes, yes!” to his pronouncements on the vanity of men and the mysterious lure of mortality. That makes it sound somewhat wank, but I think it’s a testament to the poet’s power that, at his best, these kinds of claims were both artful and persuasive. So sometimes sitting with Milosz felt like sitting with the Truth. (Luckily, I eventually close the book long enough to remember that I doubt anyone/anything who claims in word or gesture to represent Truth.)

So I have meandered through some of my impressions, ones that built up over the duration of two years’ intermittent reading, and in a way that, I think, represents some of the way I made my way through the collection too. Even if I turned every page and read every poem in the sequence that they are delivered to us in the format of the book, I still have the sense of choosing my path, or rather my engagement with it. That, finally, is part of what I think the value of reading a collected volume can be. And so (an inside joke), I am grateful to the thesis committee member who spurred me into Milosz’s work. I can’t say that I was happy in every line, but I can say that I have grown from the steady increase of familiarity with this oeuvre. Among other things, I came away with an idea of how some of my tendencies as a writer have been approached by one of the very best, and of how even the very best can make (in my estimation) missteps. I may never be as wise a poet as Milosz. All the better.

Oh yes, one more thing: Heaney and Hass were among the translators. Likely company in more ways than a few.

i photocopy individual poems out of this and tuck them into my luggage on trips, i copy them by hand into notebooks, i send them off to friends, and i hoist this comprehensive volume up from beside my bed in the foggy moments just before i fall asleep, blinkingly reading a long-loved peom or an overlooked one, to confirm my own thought-life and to hone my poetic senses. i adore milosz.

When came home from buying this I forget to get out of the car and instead sat for two hours, reading, in the cold discomfort of the driver's seat. It was worth it.

I bought this collected work in the hometown of its author, as I did every work of a Nobel Prize winning author of the country I found myself travelling through during the high summer of 2024. It was an exercise in allowing prose and observations initially external to me draw me down varied streets that the author would had walked; on the day of my departure often also to their final resting place, usually a churchyard lying in the cities outskirts. Milosz was the first I had picked up as I was looking to tunnel my way down from Poland south towards Constantinople, travelling by train down wide valleys and climbing slowly out of watersheds to follow great rivers down to my final destination. I would stop to stay for some days in time worn jewels of cities. All this while Milosz's poetry stayed with me. This is because the writing itself is embedded in the landscape and the strife it will have seen. I am referring here to what he would proudly self-pronunce as his writing of 'objective' poetry, poetry that seeks to grapple with world historical events done for and by the mortal. Considering its troubled past, doing this in Poland inevitably means being raised to the position of public servant. Taking on the role of a spokesman of a century for his conflicted country, however was something however Milosz struggled with:

You swore never to be/

A ritual mourner/

You swore never to touch/

The deep wounds of your nation/

So you would not make them holy/

With the accursed holiness that pursues/

Descendants for many centuries

Nonethelss compelled to write he throws himself (in a thoroughly Catholic way: another key facet of his prose) into sufferance and it justly wins him the most acclaimed literary prize. It is befitting to his work more broadly that the stories he was necessitated to tell left very little place for cynicism, irony, or truthfully any kind of self-fashioned distance. Whilst such a distance may be necessary for good poetry, Milosz chooses instead the recognized distance from god in his mortal life. Through this he takes well after Augustine in tending seperately to earthly and divine matters, thus achieving a universalism in his own way. For afterall, we must:

Leave/

To a poet a moments happiness/

Otherwise your world will perish.

One could say he narrates his time in a simple manner, but when his sights are set on simple things this reveals an incredible potency: the river, the path with rabbit, the children playing on the square. On the other hand since he has in his 'national poet' task description a demand to narrate the things he has lived through: the ravages of post WW1 Poland, the experience of WW2, the sufferance under Fascism, and his ultimate struggle with Stalinist cultural doctrine and self-inflicted exile, such simple images are presented more often in his poetry in their literal negative: the scream of gulls, the ruined library, the smouldering city. It is these scenes that Milosz is best able to surmize for us, all whilst wrapping them in a lovely liberal teleology that reflects (although sometimes philosophically amateurishly) the winding turns of history and the irreducible questions that it poses to us.

These snapshots of religiously existential themes pained in ghoulish grey are most present in his first poems, in fact I would argue the quality of his work steadily declines as he matures. This first period is instructed by what must have been an incredibly productive literary clique of post-war poets that were later classified as 'disaster poets'. From what I can tell they were deeply stooped in the French symbolism of the day (the 'objectivism' would come later) and lent from gothic literature to convey the gloom that pervayed their country. From this come striking poems such as 'Dawns' and especially 'Book in the Ruins' both of which carry imagery best replicated in painting in the works of Delvaux and in prose in the works of Sebald: the rubble of history seen on the cover of an old postcard or recounted in fragments of a burned book.

Milosz later moves to the US and his poetry becomes a bit more tendential and banal. The recollections he makes of his hometown and youth fade in clarity and are sentimentalized. Nonetheless his artistic development is one worth following for it has given him something he constantly reflected upon as a theistic poet: immortality.

So the world seems to drift from these pages /

Like the mist clearing on a field at dawn /

Only when two times, two forms are drawn /

Together. And their legibility /

Disturbed. Do you see that immortality /

Is not very different from the present /

and is for its sake.

(Book in the Ruins)

Our memory is childish and it saves only what we need.
*
The first movement is joy, But it is taken away.
*
Not that I want to be a god or a hero.
Just to change into a tree, grow for ages, not hurt anyone.
*
..Whatever evil I had suffered, I forgot.
To think that once I was the same man did not embarass me.
In my body I felt no pain.
When straightening up, I saw the blue sea and sails.
*
..the whole Earth is like a poem
While the sun above represents the artist.
*
It seems I was called for this:
To glorify things just because they are.
*
Love means to learn to look at yourself
The way one looks at distant things
For you are only one thing among many.
*
We and the flowers throw shadows on the earth. What has no shadow has no strength to live.
*
On the day the world ends
A bee circles a clover,
A fisherman mends a glimmering net.
Happy porpoises jump in the sea...
*
The purpose of poetry is to remind us
how difficult it is to remain just one person,
for our house is open, there are no keys in the doors,
and invisible guests come in and out at will.
*
மேலுள்ள வரிகள் அனைத்தும்மிலோஸ்உடையது. இப்படி நூற்றுக்கணக்கான வரிகளை அவருடைய மொத்ததொகுதியிலிருந்துஎடுக்க இயலும். ஒரு கவிஞனின் மொத்ததொகுதியைப்படிப்பது ஏறக்குறைய திணறலை உண்டாக்கும் அனுபவம். பரவசம், விரக்தி, அழகு, உண்மை,அனாதரவு, தனிமை, ஊழின் நடனம், முதுமை, பால்யம், வரலாற்று யதார்த்தம், புனிதம்,அறிய முடியாமையின் துக்கம், களங்கமின்மை என அத்தனை வண்ணங்களாலும் நிரம்பிய ஒரு முழு வாழ்க்கை.

கடந்த மூன்றுநான்கு மாதங்களாக படித்துக் கொண்டிருந்தேன். என்னால்கூர்மையாகத்தொகுத்துக்கொள்ள இயலவில்லை. முடியுமா என்றும் தெரியவில்லை. ஆனால்மிலோஸைப்படித்துக்கொண்டிருந்த தருணங்கள் இனிமையானவை என்றே சொல்லவேண்டும். மழைநேரத்து விடியற்காலைகளையும் டிசம்பரின் அந்தியையும் ஒருங்கேநினைவுக்குக்கொண்டுவருபவை.

எனதுபிரியத்துக்குரியபோலந்து கவிஞர் ஆடம்ஜகாஜெவ்ஸ்கி,மிலோஷைப்படித்த அனுபவத்தை, ஒரு கவிதையாக எழுதியிருக்கிறார். "ஏறக்குறைய" எனது அனுபவமும் இதுதான். டியர்மிலோஸ்,உங்களுடைய புத்தகத்தை மூடிவைத்த பிறகு, அன்றாட உலகம், மறுபடியும், Melancholic ஆக மாறிவிடுகிறதே!

Reading Milosz

byAdam Zagajewski

I read your poetry once more,
poems written by a rich man, knowing all,
and by a beggar, homeless,
an emigrant, alone.

You always wanted to go
beyond poetry, above it, soaring,
but also lower, to where our region
begins, modest and timid.

Sometimes your tone
transforms us for a moment,
we believe—truly—
that every day is sacred,

that poetry—how to put it? —
makes life rounder,
fuller, prouder, unashamed
of perfect formulation.

But evening arrives,
I lay my book aside,
and the city's ordinary din resumes—
somebody coughs, someone cries and curses.

----

"Who can tell what purpose is served by destinies
And whether to have lived on earth means little
Or much."

Picking up this collection was only by chance - I never heard of Miłosz before. Polish poetry for me was always dominated by W. Szymborska.
So getting into 800 pages of another writer was a real adventure and a one which was fruitful.

With such a volume of poems the quality is of course mixed, some of the almost essay like poems did not hit the spot for me, however many others did touch me deeply. Since Szymborska is still my number one I am giving only 4 stars here.

His style is rather hard to describe also because his collection show quite a lot of variation. Also his topics wildly vary from nature over to politics. There is a feeling over immense depth in all of the pages - some poems feel a bit like Rilke, some more like Robert Frost - but both with another layer of mystery.

The English translation from Polish is quite wonderful, you can feel that the author helped with it due to his proficiency in English. I can only wonder how much deeper the original text would feel.

So all in all Miłosz can only be recommended - it is not always an easy read but it is one which leaves you with something long after the book has been placed back on your shelf. Which makes you go back, skip through the pages and re-read those lines and feel like you are meeting up with an old friend.

"You knew the bitterness and you knew doubt
But the memory of your faults has vanished.
And you know why I cherish you today;
Men are small but their works are great."

For me, a fifth of the collection were solid 5-star poems. Many of them may have been excellent, but they didn't wink at me. Common themes were waiting for justice, remembering, legacy, gratitude, protest, and poems of place. The man lived in Lithuania, Poland, France, and the United States.

A while back I discovered another Polish poet: Wislawa Szymborska. Then I ordered this book (by mistake) because: Polish poet. [insert silly emoji] Rod Dreher in his book, Live Not By Lies references Milosz many times as a Resistance Poet, which quickened my resolve to read these 800 pages.

Poetry makes me sigh. I envy those who proclaim poetry good or bad with confidence. I wish I knew. But I keep reading it. As with so many aspects of my life, discipline precedes delight.

Here are some excerpts:

Calm down. Both your sins and your good deeds will be lost in oblivion.

We are not so badly off, if we can
Admire Dutch painting.

You would like to hear how it is in old age?
Certainly, not much is known about that country
Till we land there ourselves, with no right to return.

Liberate me from guilt, real and imagined.
Give me certainty that I toiled for Your glory.

Winner of the Nobel Prize for literature, Milosz's poetry primarily reflects his political leanings as a member of the Polish Resistance in his homeland during WWII. He later defected to France in 1951 and ultimately ended up as a professor at UC Berkeley in the 60's.

His poetry gives the reader invaluable insight into an era of political upheaval in the world and the psychological costs of war and personal hardship during that time in history.

Nobel Prize in Literature 1980.

Re-read in 2023. Surprisingly (or not?), I still agree with the review I left here four years ago!

On my quest to read something from every Nobel Prize winner, I came across Czesław Miłosz, who was until then unknown to me. What I could find was all his works bundled, so that was easy!
His poetry is a rare example of something that works well in (English) translation - probably thanks to the fact that he translated most of the poems himself. The poems smell here and there of T.S. Eliot, which is a bonus, but then more modern.
Do read beyond that one poem about the Warsaw ghetto that everybody mentions - there is much more to discover in this vast body of poetry!

3.5 — some absolute gems, some wonderful lines, but also many poems that left me indifferent (it was bound to happen in such a complete collection)

An astounding genius that was clear from his earliest work.

Miłosz is already most assuredly one of my favorite poets, and my relationship with this volume has been marked by a wondrous, but slightly perturbing, synchronicity. Every time I flip open its pages, the perfect poem for that particular temporal node inexplicably reveals itself to me.

_______

COUNSELS

If I were in the place of young poets
(quite a place, whatever the generation might think)
I would prefer not to say that the earth is a madman’s dream,
a stupid tale full of sound and fury.

It’s true, I did not happen to see the triumph of justice.
The lips of the innocent make no claims.
And who knows whether a fool in a crown,
a winecup in hand, roaring that God favors him
because he poisoned, slew, and blinded so many,
would not move the onlookers to tears: he was so gentle.

God does not multiply sheep and camels for the virtuous
and takes nothing away for murder and perjury.
He has been hiding for so long that it has been forgotten
how he revealed himself in the burning bush
and in the breast of a young Jew
ready to suffer for all who were and will be.

It is not certain if Ananke awaits her hour
to pay back what is due for the lack of measure and for pride.

Man has been given to understand
that he lives only by the grace of those in power.
Let him therefore busy himself sipping coffee, catching butterflies.
He who cares for the Republic will have his right hand cut off.

And yet, the Earth merits a bit, a tiny bit, of affection.
Not that I take too seriously consolations of nature,
and baroque ornaments, the moon, chubby clouds
(although it’s beautiful when bird-cherries blossom on the banks of the Wilia).
No, I would even advise to keep further from Nature,
from persistent images of infinite space,
of infinite time, from snails poisoned
on a path in a garden, just like our armies.

There is so much death, and that is why affection
for pigtails, bright-colored skirts in the wind,
for paper boats no more durable that we are . . .

Spanning Seven Decades with a Humble Muse......

In the very last poem of this, the greatest collection of Milosz's works, he so lucidly begins.......

Late Ripeness by Czeslaw Milosz

Not soon, as late as the approach of my ninetieth year,
I felt a door opening in me and I entered
the clarity of early morning.

One after another my former lives were departing,
like ships, together with their sorrow.........

******************

This wonderful collection spans a lush and lavish 70 long years; years magically molded in the hands of a cunning and capable and wise prophet of our times.
Milosz yearns for a 'tangible reality' to maintain the health of poetry. He is accessible even to the untrained ear.....for it is ultimately in the lack of illusion that his work shines and reverberates.

In his introduction, he concludes that "poetry has always been for me a participation in the humanly modulated time of my contemporaries."

And we see this simple humility reflected in the last verses of his final poem of this collection.
*************************

Moments from yesterday and from centuries ago -
a sword blow, the painting of eyelashes before a mirror
of polished metal, a lethal musket shot, a caravel
staving its hull against a reef - they dwell in us,
waiting for a fulfillment.

I knew, always, that I would be a worker in the vineyard,
as are all men and women living at the same time,
whether they are aware of it or not.

**************************************

This rich collection will transport you back and forth in time with a gifted, yet humble master of distillation, distance and destiny!

Česlav Miloš bio je neumorni "učitelj slobode", izvanredan intelektualac i najveći poljski pjesnik dvadesetog vijeka. Rođen u Litvaniji, završio je gimnaziju i studije prava u Viljnusu, da bi Drugi svjetski rat proveo u Varšavi. Posle rata, neko vrijeme je radio u diplomatskoj službi Poljske. Pedesetih je emigrirao, najprije u Pariz, a zatim, nešto kasnije, u Ameriku, gdje je dobio posao na Univerzitetu u Berkliju. Neprekidno je pisao: pjesme i eseje, a njegove knjige objavljivao je Poljski književni institut u Parizu. U Poljskoj su njegove knjige godinama bile zabranjene, i malo ko je znao za njega. Tek 1980, kada mu je dodijeljena Nobelova nagrada za književnost, stvari polako počinju da se mijenjaju. Od pada Berlinskog zida, najveći dio godine provodio je u Krakovu, iako nikada nije sasvim napustio svoj američki dom. Umro je 2004. godine.

Poezija Česlava Miloša je strastvena, snažna i mudra; nemilosrdno ironična prema istrošenim mitovima i fanatizmima svih vrsta. Nasuprot tolikim drugim pjesnicima koji su pisali "iza gvozdene zavjese", Miloš piše kosmopolitski i bez opijanja bilo kakvim ideologijama. Iako uronjena u poljsku kulturu i istoriju, Miloševa poezija sadrži i fragmente i apokrifne spise najrazličitijih mislilaca, jezika i iskustava. (Dovoljno je sjetiti se "Himne o perli"!) Ponekad, u pjesmi se nađe i neki intimni dokument, kao, na primjer, pismo. Osim toga, Miloš u pojedine poeme ugrađuje i arhivske administrativne izvore, ili prevode tuđih rečenica. ("Gde sunce izlazi i gde zalazi") Drugim riječima, njegova poezija se širi i upija u sebe sve ono što može da joj koristi, formirajući na taj način svijet složenih značenja, asocijacija i simbola koji nipošto ne želimo da napustimo, jer smo bez njega siromašniji i tužniji.

Miloševe pjesme, objavljene neposredno posle rata, nedvosmisleno su oštre. Rat je donio porazna i gotovo nepodnošljiva saznanja o ljudskoj prirodi, o suštinskoj ravnodušnosti svakog od nas. Toliki ljudi su umrli, i sa nastalom upitnom i bolnom prazninom nije se lako nositi. Miloš se obraća mrtvima bez nade, ali sa poštovanjem. Kako nastaviti sa životom? Da li su stare vrijednosti one prave? Šta je u srcu ljudske prirode? Poezija nastoji da ispita, ali i da konstatuje. U tom smislu, naročito je zanimljiva pjesma "Campo dei fiori", u kojoj se opisuju dva istorijska događaja. Naime, na Uskrs 1943. u Varšavi je spaljen jevrejski geto, što je bio odgovor na prvi oružani pokušaj Jevreja da se suprotstave nacističkim planovima. Ipak, tog dana u Varšavi se "ništa nije primećivalo", ljudi su nemarno uživali u svakodnevnoj razdraganoj banalnosti. Ovoj slici suprotstavlja se (ili pridružuje) prizor veselih i bezbrižnih ljudi na Trgu cvijeća, gdje je svojevremeno spaljen Đordano Bruno. Zaključak je sumoran i opominjući:

...Ko može, nauk će shvatiti,
Da svet varšavski, rimski,
Trguje, banči, voli se
Ne mareći za lomače.
A neko drugi shvatiće
Pouku o prolaznosti;
O zaboravu što raste
Pre no što plamen ugasne...

Miloš je bio i jedan od rijetkih koji je shvatio koliko opasno može biti "pjevanje" o nacionalnim istorijskim tema, koji je naslutio pritajeno i otrovno djelovanje nacionalnih mitova i zabluda i brzinu kojom se pamćenje preobražava u sumanute oblike nacionalizma i zatvorenosti. Tako u pjesmi "U Varšavi" kaže:

Kleo si se da nikad nećeš biti
Pogrebna narikača,
Kleo si se da nikad nećeš dirati
Velike rane svoga naroda,
Da ih ne bi pretvarao u svetinju,
Prokletu svetinju što progoni
Potomke u kasnijim vekovima.

Po svojoj posvećenosti opisivanju ratnih užasa i opsesivnom suočavanju sa tamnim stranama istorije, Miloš iz ovog perioda veoma je sličan mladom Tadeušu Ruževiču, kojem je i posvetio jednu pjesmu.

U međuvremenu, u Poljskoj se zahuktava komunizam. Suočen sa zbunjujućim, pa i zaprepašćujućim ponašanjem intelektualaca u nastupajućem totalitarnom sistemu, Miloš piše nadaleko poznatu studiju "Zarobljeni um", koja će mu donijeti veliki ugled u inostranstvu i žestoke neprilike u Poljskoj. U pjesmama "Dete Evrope" i "Narod", on se sa razornim cinizmom obračunava sa novonastalim društvenim prilikama i sveopštim potpadanjem pod mašineriju laži i licemjerja.

Začepljivali smo vrata gasnih komora, krali smo hleb,
Znajući da će sledeći dan biti teži od prethodnog.
...
Naša pakosna mudrost nema sebi ravne na svetu.

Ili:

Neka ne znaju usta koja izgovaraju hipotezu
Za ruke koje upravo krivotvore eksperiment.

Nek tvoje ruke što krivotvoje eksperiment ne znaju
Za usta koja upravo izgovaraju hipotezu.

Ipak, stihovi poput ovih predstavljaju rijetkost u kasnijoj Miloševoj poeziji, koja se sve više okreće promišljanju religije i filozofije, bilježenju trenutaka otkrovenja, te traganju za naznakama opšteg sklada i smisla. Za Miloša, trajni odlazak u inostranstvo označio je i početak postojane, teško iskorjenjive samoće. Pomalo zaboravljen i prepušten sam sebi, on istrajava u pisanju, iako piše na jeziku koji u njegovom novom okruženju skoro niko ne razumije, a njegovi zemljaci u Poljskoj ne mogu da čitaju. To je i period nastajanja njegovih najvažnijih knjiga. Mnoge pjesme iz ovog perioda posjeduju i veoma izraženu, mističnu senzualnost.

Kad je mesečina i kad šetaju žene u raznobojnim haljinama
Čudim se njihovim očima, trepavicama i svem uređenju sveta.
I čini mi se da bi iz tako velike uzajamne sklonosti
Mogla najzad da nastane krajnja istina.

U emigraciji je napisana i pjesma "Čarobni breg", možda i jedna od najljepših pjesama o usamljenosti uopšte. U sasvim drugačijem pejzažu od onoga na koji je navikao, pjesnik se prisjeća svojih prijatelja, emigranata - predavača koji su tu prije koju godinu umrli, i polako gubi pojam o vremenu.

Znači, neću steći moć, neću spasti svet?
I slava će me zaobići, ni tijare, ni krune?
Zar sam radi toga vežbao sebe, Jedinoga,
Da bih slagao strofe za galebove i magle od mora,
Slušao kako tamo nisko huče brodske sirene?

Dok nije prošlo. Šta prošlo? Život.
Sada se ne stidim svoga gubitka.
...
Samo iz istrajnosti uzima se istrajnost.
Pokretima sam stvarao nevidljivo uže.
Penjao sam se po njemu i držalo me je.

Pjesnik je daleko, i shvatio je da je jezik "njegova jedina otadžbina". Uz to, on se prisjeća svog djetinjstva i pokušava da opiše nove, američke predjele, koji su donekle izmijenjeni savremenim saobraćajnim sredstvima i fabrikama i na neki način najavljuju budućnost. Tako je nastala i poema "Po našoj zemlji", u kojoj se sa zadivljujućom vještinom pretapaju: motivi iz kalifornijske istorije, nezaboravne ličnosti iz djetinjstva, ulomci američkih i poljskih pejzaža, uz tragove mlaznih aviona na nebu ili nekih drugih, "industrijskih" objekata. Pri tom, sve je savršeno saliveno, bez trunke pretjerivanja, sa zavodljivim nejasnoćama i prazninama koje podsjećaju na nježnost. Evo samo jednog fragmenta:

U podne bele ruševine grobalja na planinama;
grad zasenjujuće bleštavog cementa
slepljen slinom insekata
kovitla se na smenu s nebom u turbini puteva.
...
Probijao sam plafon zvuka?
...
Stid ili ne stid
Što mi se tako zbilo.

Iako je napisao mnogo veoma dugih, i, ponekad, teško prohodnih poema, Miloš se kasnije sve češće okretao izuzetno kratkim, gotovo aforističnim formama. Vrhunac takvog izraza dostigao je u čuvenim "Rečenicama".

Pretnja: Strašno je pomisliti da će se spominjati ono što sam zaboravio.

Uteha: Umiri se. I tvoje grehe i tvoja dobra dela pokriće zaborav.

Čežnja: Ne da bih odmah bio jedan od bogova ili heroja. Da se pretvorim u drvo, da rastem vekovima, da nikog ne vređam.

Pred kraj života, Miloš je iznenadio i oduševio cjelokupnu književnu javnost objavljivanjem zbirki "To" i "Drugi prostor". U njima se ostareli i nostalgični pjesnik prisjeća određenih trenutaka obojenih sjetom (zato što su davno prošli i biće sasvim izgubljeni kada umre on, koji se jedini sjeća!); pokušava da se našali, ali i da namiri neke stare račune. Zamišlja "drugi prostor", onaj gdje se odlazi "posle", i, na kraju života, prije poslednjih filozofskih rasprava, povjerljivo otkriva da su "najveće vrline odustajanje i upornost". Među ovim, poslednjim pjesmama, nalazi se i jedna inspirisana Ovidijevim "Metamorfozama". Nema praznine pred kojom književnost neće iznaći neku utjehu.

Najzad, treba reći i ovo: posle smrti svoje supruge, Miloš je napisao pjesmu "Orfej i Euridika". U njoj, mit se preoblači u savremenije, ali i intimnije ruho. Pjesma očarava svojom prefinjenom ljepotom i dostojanstvom tuge, ljubavi i boli. Ipak, mit (sudbinu) je nemoguće izmijeniti – kraj je unaprijed poznat.

...Svitalo je. Pojavile su se pukotine u stenama
Pod blistavim okom izlaza iz podzemlja.
I dogodilo se kao što je predosetio. Kad je okrenuo glavu,
Iza njega, na stazi, nije bilo nikoga.

Sunce. I nebo, a na njemu oblaci.
Sada je tek nešto u njemu vikalo: Euridiko!
Kako ću živeti bez tebe, utešiteljko!
Ali, mirisala je trava, a dole se čulo zujanje pčela.
I zaspao je, sa obrazom na vreloj zemlji.

Read, Currently Reading, Want to Read, Read Which Year? I mean, all of them. Goodreads isn't well-suited for categorizing poetry collections. I've read and reread many of these poems over the years, most of them around 2011, some of them while crying one morning in this tough week. They're beautiful, painful, honest, the words one always wants to use for valued poetry.

And I don't know poetry really, despite writing it myself while pretending I'm writing text messages and journal entries. I don't know how to talk about it, despite studying this volume in a university course. Excuses.

The existence of this man and his writing feels strangely entwined with my life outside of the work itself, which always makes it so hard to review. I wonder if a photo album somewhere still shows me a baby in a baby carrier, worn by my mother as he smiles and holds up a reply from Miłosz he's just picked out of the mailbox in the beautiful mountain forest of my first home. I don't think the letter still exists but I could ask my mother what it was about. Then life in Berkeley, growing up, taking the bus past Miłosz's last home many times without knowing it. Then university, and a Miłosz course, discovering a more complete version of recent Slavic history outside my own Russian language knowledge. That learned me poetry, and Miłosz, and Poland, and that was beautiful and able to be appreciated and analyzed for a time. But the professor is dead now, before I could reach out and ask him to tell again the stories of befriending Miłosz, and thank him for translating Pilch, and tell him that introducing my father to Pilch was a gift and a thank you for my father introducing me to Gombrowicz, a sad literary substitute for an actual relationship but very important to me as a small legitimate source of genuine meaning and connection that was not touched by my father's abuse. And in a life still too young and in process for me to understand, my immigrant years in Central Europe, Miłosz is me reversed, traveling the opposite route to live in my homeland. I have no idea how to connect his Holocaust and communist Europe to the 21st century life here, a bridge I feel I need to understand before I can be at home. But his immigrant's eye on Berkeley is so much clearer a perspective to me than anything my Californian-born fellows ever express about the place. And I haven't even mentioned that my childhood name was Miłosz, briefly, for one Polish immigrant whose son I played with and taught English, and who became such a loving family friend for a time that my own mother called me Miłosz too.

Yes, this is getting predictably confused. Miłosz is linked to mother and father and first home and childhood and names and second home and my young strange passion for the Slavic and university and fifth home and a country and literature that always seems lurking at my edges too important for its distance in my life. If I spent more hours with this volume I could find more: why has the phrase "we are both the snake and the wheel" stuck around my tense tendons for so long? Miłosz feeling guilt by being a Christian watching the burning of the Warsaw ghetto; what parallels do I feel so far removed from that experience, an atheist grandchild of a Christian pastor, entangled subtly and deeply in Jewish relationships for so many formative experiences, and then moving from a culture so influenced by Jewish diaspora to the nearly barren hole at the very center of genocide?

But I am not for now in pain about all this. I have a messy gratitude for a man who tried to be as honest as possible in his poetry, his fiction, and his nonfiction, even though he grew up at a time of such rapid and brutal history that he was in a different generation than people a couple years younger or older. His lifelong work to connect and understand inspires me.

El año pasado, navegando por los catálogos de Amazon me tope con este libro de Czeslaw Milosz, en ese momento había conocido a una Polaca que se volvió muy importante en mi vida y querer leer a ese autor era, de cierta manera, acercarme a los dolores y placeres de su cultura.
Fue un libro difícil de encontrar y apenas lo hice. Leerlo tampoco fue una tarea sencilla, con 800 páginas y con los primeros trabajos del autor hasta sus últimos. Uno de mis mejores amigos, que también es poeta, me dijo que no le gusta leer las primeras obras de los autores, que los prefiere cuando ya agarraron vuelo. Yo soy lo opuesto. Definitivamente es pesado leer las primeras obras, me pasó con Louise Glück, por ejemplo, si no hubiera sabido que Triumph of Achilles y Ararat eran unos librazos, hubiera renunciado antes. Con Milosz no me pasó así, los primeros trabajos del autor, para haber sido escritos en 1931, y años similares, se me hicieron bastante modernos en sus formas, su renuncia a la métrica, la brevedad de sus versos y lo mundano de sus metáforas.
Milosz, al vivir la segunda guerra mundial de primera mano, esperaba muchos poemas sobre eso; pero increíblemente es bastante sutil cuando aborda el dolor que le provocó todo eso. Son pocos los poemas que atacan directamente ese tema y son poemas muy poderosos, un par de ellos me hicieron llorar. Pero también hay cierta huida a la hora de abordar ese dolor. Parece evidente que Milosz trató de huir la mayor parte de su vida, y eso también queda visible en sus últimos poemas cuando habla sobre huir, sobre alcoholismo y sobre el dolor que le causó su vida. Me sorprendió que no fuera tan directo al abordar esos temas pero lo aprecié mucho, sino hubiera leído durante todo el libro.
Tiene un par de libros sobre el pasado de Polonia y su historia. Esos fueron complicados de leer porque desconocía todo eso. No sabía que había habido grandes reyes como Boleslaw. También desconocía sus leyendas. No tenía ni idea de mitología Polaca. Entender estos poemas me llevó a investigar y leer sobre esos temas lo que dificultó mi lectura definitivamente pero también me enseñó muchas cosas, y al mismo tiempo habla sobre las habilidades poéticas del autor para tomar la historia de la nación y catalizarla en sus poemas.
La mitad del libro fue la que menos me gustó. Hubo varios poemas que me parecieron brillantes y que marqué pero el principio y el final son las mejores partes del libro a mí parecer. Al principio habla sobre su país, sobre el abandono y sobre el dolor de la guerra. Al final habla sobre esos mismos temas, cincuenta años después y es increíble el contraste de su voz poética y como la vida que vivió le proporciona nuevos ojos para recorrer esos dolores del principio de siglo.
Milosz es un poeta bastante particular y que con una voz concisa, emotiva y moderna retrata temas que todos deberíamos de leer. Un imperdible poético sin duda.

How does a person review a book like this? I think it has taken me 5-6 months to read. If a question is, did I understand all of it, no. But I read all of it, enjoyed most of it, understood enough of it. For readers who struggle with poetry, I would recommend reading the collection in a reverse order. The later poems are more accessible. Overall, I enjoyed the challenge of reading this book all the way. But I think it would be fine to make your own selections for what to read from it.

The best poems are in the middle of the book. The early and late writings are much worse in my opinion, with few exceptions. There's a complacent banality to them that feels almost offensive to the reader. Sometimes I wanted to put the book down and say: really? You, a Nobel Prize winning poet, couldn't think of a better way to say this?

There are few poems I loved in their entirety, but there are many stunning lines in the middle section of this collection.

(0nly read to page 200 for class)
I'm known to be a very bad reader of poetry because I can't always interpret it correctly or just don't enjoy it but I can say that I did actually enjoy reading the earlier years of Milosz's poetry. His use of words and imagery is beautiful and I found myself enjoying reading poetry for the first time in a while.

An absolute masterpiece. This is maybe the best poetry book i've ever read.

Bought this in my favorite used bookstore for three dollars. I’m so glad I did. Lucky enough to have picked up a friend for life.

A collection of Milosz poems written over almost seventy years, who wrote that "youth didn't last long. Nobody knew that work would divide a day into great toil and dead rest."

One of my most favourite poets. Essential reading.

Poezja Czesława Miłosza jest ,jak lek na duszę.

Like any long book of collected poems from a respected poet, this had some great snippets, but ended up being a bit of a slog.

Regarded as one of the great poets of the 20th century, he won the 1980 Nobel Prize in Literature, but beyond my understanding. I went back to Robert Frost, Mary Oliver, and David Whyte.